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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Big day today. We got to hold (or at least pet) our newest class member. The chick that hatched on Tuesday is now living in the box outside the incubator. It is really soft and very cute and the kids just love it! No other eggs hatched today, but we will get more live chicks delivered tomorrow and they will be here for about a week. We are super excited!

Today we had visitors from the morning and afternoon Head Start classes. They were visiting to see what it is like to be in kindergarten. It was fun for the kindergartners to be the "big kids" and show the Head Start students what it is like to be in kindergarten. We had a Morning Meeting, did the alphabet chart, Number Corner, read a story and completed a farm coloring sheet. We even introduced them to the newest member of our class…our cute baby chick! The kindergartners were great role models.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

In between all of the excitement today, we did manage to learn a little more about farms in preparation for our upcoming field trip. Today's topic...

We read an awesome nonfiction book called Pigs by Robin Nelson. This book was full of facts about pigs. We couldn't believe how such a small book could have so much information! After we read the story, Mrs. Kurt divided us in to groups to work together and come up with two or three pig facts we learned from the story. We are still working on how to work together in a group so this was good practice. Here is what we came up with:

This afternoon, we finished our pig projects. We did the painting yesterday and finished it today. They turned out really cute!

A couple of weeks ago, the fourth grade students in Mrs. Fifield and Mrs. Holtz's class asked if we could help them with a math project. They were going to create story problems for kindergartners. In doing this, the fourth graders had to be authors to write the problems and like most authors, they needed to do some research. They visited our classroom and interviewed the kindergarten students to learn about them, their interests and what kinds of problems they liked to do.

Now, the fourth graders have been working hard. They conducted research, wrote problems, edited their work, printed their problems using the computer and even found graphics to go with them. This morning, they invited us to their classroom to actually see the finished product and to see if we could solve the problems they created.

It was really great to see the fourth grade students take ownership of this project. They did an excellent job and the kindergartners really enjoyed solving problems with them. It was especially fun for Mrs. Kurt to see some of her former students, too. Thank you fourth grade students!

Well, today was the day! We experienced our first successful hatch of this school year. As you know, we received six eggs on April 30 to put in the incubator. When we arrived at school this morning, we found one of the eggs will a little piece of the shell missing and a few tiny cracks.

It's the tan one on the left side!

Following our Specialist time in Spanish, we checked again and discovered the hole getting a little bigger and we could even hear peeping sounds. We headed to our chair pouches to grab Our Chick Journals and decided to make an entry about our observations.

We noticed that hatching chicks do not really like lots of noise so we tried to be really quiet. While we were gone to Mrs. Fifield and Mrs. Holtz's fourth grade classroom, our first chick popped out of the egg. We did not see it but Mrs. Schlagel was able to capture the hatch on video and posted it to YouTube. I will send you the link tomorrow if you are interested.

When we returned from fourth grade, this is what we saw...

We decided baby chicks are NOT very cute right after they hatch. After a few hours in the incubator, we prepared the box where the chick (and hopefully it's siblings) will be living in our classroom. After school I put the new chick in the box with some food, water and a heat lamp.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Our annual "Walk 4 Northview" PTO fundraiser was held on Friday May 16. We had another beautiful day for this event, even if it was a little chilly when we started out. This annual fundraiser is held to help raise money for science and engineering activities at Northview, such as the event we had this week put on by the University of St. Thomas. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this worthwhile event and who came to participate with your child. Special thanks to the Northview PTO and all the volunteers who made this event successful! The kindergartners did a great job!